It gets even more wild the more you read of that article. One guy pawning his wife for a quart of gin…then the government crackdown when things started getting even worse!
That 14 gallons number raised all kinds of questions for me:
What potency was this gin that could be consumed in this quantity but without killing so many more of its consumers?
How can they possibly produce gin this cheap? Slave labor from the Caribbean?
What would the logistics look like to move this much gin to a population consuming this much? This is the days before motor vehicles so everything would have had to be moved by human or horse/donkey/mule/cow pulled cart. Steam engines wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years. So it was likely animal cart the number of barrels of gin must have been a river of full carts moving into the city and a river of empty ones headed out all the time.
Public sanitation didn’t really exist. Public sewer systems wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years or so so the entire city must have smelled like urine all the time.
With the sheer number of gin containers needed for this volume, did they have a “deposit” on bottles like we have sometimes today? Did they have an underground economy of people collecting empties to trade back in?
This lead me down a rabbit hole an introduced me to “Mother’s Ruin” of the cheap gin sold at the time:
source
It gets even more wild the more you read of that article. One guy pawning his wife for a quart of gin…then the government crackdown when things started getting even worse!
That was a nice read. Thanks for sharing!
14 gallons per year? Rookie numbers! I drank more than that on a single 7-day binge!
That 14 gallons number raised all kinds of questions for me: